The Most Popular Cloud Services Rankings 2016

With over 20,000 cloud services available today, many of them free or low-cost, consumers and enterprises have more choice in the applications they use than ever before. Whether you’re a consumer, IT department, or journalist, there are many reasons you may be interested to know which cloud services are most frequently used. However, obtaining reliable data from vendors can be next to impossible and surveys measure perception at best. Skyhigh offers a cloud access security broker (CASB) used to protect their usage of 27 million employees at over 600 enterprises worldwide, and by aggregating and anonymizing our customers’ usage data we can deliver unique insight into cloud computing trends. We publish these insights in our Cloud Adoption and Risk Report (download a free copy here). So, without further ado, here are top 20 most popular enterprise cloud services, top 20 most popular consumer services, top 10 file sharing services, top 10 collaboration services, and top 10 social media services.

Top 20 Most Popular Enterprise Cloud Services

The Top 20 Enterprise Cloud Services list offers insight into the cloud apps and services that businesses are standardizing on and provides CIOs with a short-list of services that have reached mass-adoption across enterprises.

By the end of 2015, 72.9% of the cloud services in use by the average company were enterprise cloud services and these services accounted for 71.8% of data employees uploaded to the cloud at work.

The data shows that Office 365 has started to successfully transition its legacy on-premises software to the cloud, which has placed it atop this list.

Office 365 is followed by Salesforce and Cisco WebEx. From a security standpoint, the top 20 enterprise cloud services are significantly more likely to have enterprise-class security controls than the average enterprise cloud service (85% vs 9.9%).

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Top 20 Most Popular Consumer Apps in the Enterprise

By the end of 2015, the average organization was using an astounding 1,154 cloud services, an increase of 38.9% year-over-year. Consumer cloud services accounted for 27.1% of it. While some of these apps are used for personal needs, many are being used for business related activities, driven in large part by their rich feature set and ease of use. Not surprisingly, 28.2% of all data businesses upload to the cloud ends up in a consumer cloud service.

Social media, content sharing, and collaboration services dominate the top 20 list.

Only one service on the top 20 list is enterprise ready (5%) versus the overall average of 3.5% across all consumer services. It is clear security isn’t a strong factor in the cloud service selection process for consumer services compared with enterprise services.

Consumer apps can present real risks to enterprises. Data loss in consumer apps can occur due to malware or insider threat. Skyhigh routinely sees and alerts its customers to incidents where sites such as Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest are used to exfiltrate data. Data loss can also occur due to the acceptance of terms and conditions related to IP ownership. Additionally, one popular site, VK, has a history of piracy-related usage.

Top 10 File Sharing Services

When it comes to file sharing services, Google Drive ranks #1 in terms of number of active users, followed by Dropbox. The percentage of files that are shared via file sharing services have hit an all-time high and will likely continue to increase. Of all documents stored in these services, 37.2% are shared with someone other than the file’s owner. This means users are increasingly using file sharing services to not only sync files across their own devices, but also share files with others. 71.6% of shared documents are done so with internal employees, of which 12.9% are shared with every employee.

Top 10 Collaboration Services

Collaboration continues to be the category with the greatest variety of cloud services in use by a wide margin. The average organization uses a whopping 174 distinct collaboration services. This is, in part, a function of the fact that each collaboration service tends to solve a unique problem. For this reason, the average employee uses 8 different collaboration services, while 6 of the top 10 most used collaboration services belong to either Microsoft or Google.

Top 10 Social Media Services

As expected, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin lead the way in the social media category. Tumblr has climbed several spots following its acquision by Yahoo! and currently sits at #4. Russia’s YK and China’s Sina Weibo hold the 5th and 6th spots respectively. While a lot of this usage occurs for personal reasons, businesses continue to use social media as a core marketing channel.